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Germanwings victim remembered as funeral 3 months after crash

Robert Oliver Calvo was on his last weekly business trip abroad before a change at work that would have kept him home more.

Robert Tansill Oliver, centre right and Maribel Calvo, the parents of Robert Oliver Calvo, a businessman who was on board of the Germanwings jet which crashed in the French Alps, pray, during a religious funeral service, in Montcada, near Barcelona, Spain, Saturday. (Emilio Morenatti / AP)

Robert Oliver Calvo, who died in the March plane crash, was on his last weekly business trip abroad before a change at work that would have kept him home more.
(Robert Tansill Oliver / AP)

A woman cries as she holds a memorial card for Robert Oliver Calvo. Hundreds of tearful mourners have packed a funeral home to say goodbye to Calvo, who died while on a business trip. (Emilio Morenatti / AP)

By Alan ClendenningAssociated Press

Sat., June 20, 2015

MONTCADA, SPAIN—Three months after the Germanwings jet crashed in the French Alps, hundreds of tearful mourners packed a funeral home Saturday to say goodbye to Robert Oliver Calvo, who was on his last weekly business trip abroad before a change at work that would have kept him home more.

No mention of the crash itself was made during the service, except in the funeral program that said he died at age 36 “in the airplane tragedy in the Alps on the Germanwings Airbus A320 owned by Lufthansa.”

Instead, the father of two small children was remembered as a deeply religious and dedicated family man on his last regular business trip abroad for the Barcelona-based clothing store chain Desigual.

Oliver Calvo’s job as a real estate manager was to head to Austria, Germany and Switzerland frequently for three- to four-day trips to inaugurate the company’s new stores, and he was on his way to open a new Duesseldorf store when the plane crashed.

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“He just didn’t want to be on the road so much. He had been travelling all over Europe for years and now he wasn’t going to be travelling every week or every other week so he could spend more time with his family,” friend Luis Anera, who led the memorial service, said in an interview.

The victim’s father, Robert Tansill Oliver, says the family finds some solace because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses and are convinced that Oliver Calvo will be resurrected.

His son’s remains were among those of 32 victims sent to Spain this week after the remains of German victims were sent home earlier. In all, 150 people died — most of them German or Spanish.

And he urged people who may have known Lubitz to contact authorities so their testimony can help explain his condition.

“It’s hard for me to believe something didn’t happen during one of his other flights and no one noticed,” Tansill Oliver said.

Lubitz, who had a history of depression, had seven medical appointments in the month before the crash, including three with a psychiatrist, and had taken eight sick days off work, a French prosecutor has said. Some of the doctors felt Lubitz was psychologically unstable, and some felt he was unfit to fly, but didn’t report that information to anyone because of medical secrecy laws.

Before the crash Lubitz searched on the Internet in March for ways of getting hold of the toxic compound potassium cyanide, tranquilizer Valium and lethal combinations of medicines.

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